From E Street to Hollywood Boulevard

From:thewest.com
Date:Jan.28.2004
By Debi Enker

THERE was a striking symmetry when Simon Baker presented two of the big three awards on Logies night.

Eleven years ago, Baker had been the recipient of the most popular new talent award for his work on E Street.

Now, he'd returned to the stage of Australian television's much-hyped night of nights as the golden boy made good, the star of the US drama series, The Guardian, and as a high-profile celebrity guest.

Over the past decade, Baker has carved out the kind of career that many aspiring actors dream about. He started out in soaps (E Street, Home and Away, Heartbreak High), then packed up his young family to take a chance on Tinseltown.

His first role was a small but memorable one in the award-winning thriller, LA Confidential. After finding a foothold in the film industry, he also found favour with Leslie Moonves, the head of the CBS network, and was offered the lead in the Pittsburgh-based legal drama.

His perpetually troubled character, lawyer Nick Fallin, is now a familiar TV presence as the show's third series comes to an end tonight.

Baker is clearly proud of the series, in which he plays the title character, a hot-shot corporate lawyer and convicted drug offender who's ordered to serve out his sentence doing community service work in a child-advocacy office.

But that doesn't mean he's not aware of the show's limitations, either for him as an actor or as a product of free-to-air network television.

"There's a certain standard that the show sets when we get it right, which is obviously not every episode," he says. "But when all the elements come together the right way, we capture something that is rare on commercial network television in America."

Created by David Hollander, The Guardian has both the top end of town and the grimy, mean streets covered. Nick spends a part of his professional life in the offices of Fallin & Fallin, a powerhouse law firm he runs in partnership with his father, the venerable Burton (Dabney Coleman). There he deals with bullying CEOs and corporate takeovers.

Then he heads downtown to a desk in the less luxurious offices of Legal Services, where he represents teenage incest victims, abused street kids and child prostitutes.

For Baker, the show might have a legal backdrop, but it's really about a father and son.

"The core of it is this sort-of love story between the father and the son, how they're trying to have a relationship and they can't: they just can't communicate. That's something that's not necessarily spoken about in the show, but it's the core."

Baker thought from the time that he read Hollander's pilot script that he could do something interesting with Nick Fallin. Though his experience on a failed pilot, The Last Best Place, in 1996, had soured him on the idea of working in television, things had changed.

For starters, his wife, actress Rebecca Rigg, whom he'd met on the set of E Street, was expecting their third child. So Baker was thinking of a more stable working life.

He'd made nine, mostly lesser-known films, but found that "every time I'd do a film, I'd come back and have to hit the pavement again and audition for other films. I didn't get the Hugh Jackman ride, or the Heath Ledger ride: one movie and click."

While the prospect of pavement-pounding was unappealing, Baker had also noticed that there were interesting things happening in television: he thought that some of the recent series were better written than a lot of the movies he'd seen.

He was keen to give it a try: "I thought I could do something with the role that would probably be a lot different from what a lot of other actors in America would try to do with it," he explains.

What he was aiming to do was to follow in the footsteps of some of the Hollywood greats he'd admired, men such as William Holden, Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen and, more recently, Clint Eastwood. He wanted to create a quietly intriguing anti-hero.

"I thought I could walk a line with Nick, that I could make the character very internal, where he wasn't likeable but the audience would still root for him. There was this challenge: I thought I could play this sort of thing where you're hoping he makes the right choices and you feel for him when he makes the wrong choices."

But if part of Baker's inspiration came from his movie idols, he was also inspired by his cultural heritage.

"I love the stoic nature," he says. "Growing up in Australia, I saw so many of those people. You watch a football game in Australia and someone scores a try under the post and you don't see too much self-congratulatory behaviour. It's sort of, well, OK, put your head down, try not to smile."

Reflecting on his career, Baker is a lot more measured than his agent might be. He doesn't see an inspiring tale of a boy from Down Under making good in Hollywood.

"I've never, ever looked at this like, 'I'm on a hit TV series in America: I've made it' - I've never approached it like that. For me it's always about the personal fulfilment in what I'm doing."